CHAPTER I THE BIRTH OF MODERN EGYPT NAPOLEON — MEHEMET ALI — PALMERSTON " And the Egyptians will I give over into the hand of a cruel lord; and a fierce king shall rule over them, saith the Lord, the Lord of Hosts."—ISA. xix. 4. MODERN Egypt as a nation dates only from the Great War. But Modern Egypt as a self-governing State derives from the Great War of a century ago. Therefore the adventures of our Cleopatra with her Turkish Antony and with her British Cassar begin in that springtime of present-day politics, when the hot blast of the French Revolution broke up the ice-bound political systems of the eighteenth century. For those Hounds of Spring, the Napoleonic armies, brought a rain of new ideas and new institutions on the parched provinces of the Ottoman Empire, then still occupying Eastern Europe and North Africa. Under this fertilising shower new nations began to spring up and armed men to assemble where before there had been only the silence of the desert and valleys of dry bones. And it is a striking tribute to the undying charm of our heroine that it was none other than Napoleon himself who first came a-wooing. Since the ancient Pharaonic civilisation fell into a decline and died, Egypt had been governed by alien con- querors. And, after the Arab conquest, this alien rule had been exercised by that very interesting institution, the slave soldiery of the Mamelukes, A mamluk was originally 3, male white slave, and this institution of what 23